I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different inequalities that originate in
society; but is this all, or does it not ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman
which has seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature? I believe that the
social changes that bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and,
in general, superiors and inferiors will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of
man. But here, more than ever, I feel the necessity of making myself clearly understood; for there
is no subject on which the coarse and lawless fancies of our age have taken a freer range.

There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes,
would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the
same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would
mix them in all things--their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be con-
ceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded, and from so
preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and dis-
orderly women.

It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be
established between the sexes. They admit that as nature has appointed such wide differences
between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a
distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in
making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in causing each of them to fulfill
their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the
great principle of political economy which governs the manufacturers of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman in order
that the great work of society may be the better carried on.

In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of
action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that
are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family or
conduct a business or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled
to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious efforts which demand
the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. If,
on the one hand, an American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic
employments, she is never forced, on the other, to go beyond it. Hence it is that the women of
America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally
preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women although
they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men.

Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is the
subversion of marital power or the confusion of the natural authorities in families. They hold that
every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and that the natural head of
the conjugal association is man. They do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner,
and they maintain that in the smaller association of husband and wife as well as in the great social
community the object of democracy is to regulate and legalize the powers that are necessary, and
not to subvert all power.

This opinion is not peculiar to one sex and contested by the other; I never observed that the
women of America consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, or that
they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. It appeared to me, on the contrary, that
they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will and make it their boast to
bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off. Such, at least, is the feeling expressed by the
most virtuous of their sex; the others are silent; and in the United States it is not the practice for a
guilty wife to clamor for the rights of women while she is trampling on her own holiest duties.

It has often been remarked that in Europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery
which men lavish upon women; although a European frequently affects to be the slave of woman,
it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United States men seldom
compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them. They constantly display an
entire confidence in the understanding of a wife and a profound respect for her freedom; they have
decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of a man to discover the plain truth, and her heart as
firm to embrace it; and they have never sought to place her virtue, any more than his, under the
shelter of prejudice, ignorance, and fear.

It would seem in Europe, where man so easily submits to the despotic sway of women, that they
are nevertheless deprived of some of the greatest attributes of the human species and considered
as seductive but imperfect beings; and (what may well provoke astonishment) women ultimately
look upon themselves in the same light and almost consider it as a privilege that they are entitled
to show themselves futile, feeble, and timid. The women of America claim no such privileges.

Again, it may be said that in our morals we have reserved strange immunities to man, so that there
is, as it were, one virtue for his use and another for the guidance of his partner, and that,
according to the opinion of the public, the very same act may be punished alternately as a crime or
only as a fault. The Americans do not know this iniquitous division of duties and rights; among
them the seducer is as much dishonored as his victim.

It is true that the Americans rarely lavish upon women those eager attentions which are commonly
paid them in Europe, but their conduct to women always implies that they suppose them to be
virtuous and refined; and such is the respect entertained for the moral freedom of the sex that in
the presence of a woman the most guarded language is used lest her ear should be offended by an
expression. In America a young unmarried woman may alone and without fear undertake a long
journey.

The legislators of the United States, who have mitigated almost all the penalties of criminal law,
still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public
opinion. This may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more precious than a
woman's honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too
severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will. In France, where the same offense is
visited with far milder penalties, it is frequently difficult to get a verdict from a jury against the
prisoner. Is this a consequence of contempt of decency or contempt of women? I cannot but
believe that it is a contempt of both.

Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform
the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their
lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They do not give to the
courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man, but they never doubt
her courage; and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect
and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as
sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear. Thus, then, while they have allowed the
social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done all they could to raise her morally and
intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently
understood the true principle of democratic improvement.

As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are
confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of
extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were
asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many
important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of
that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.